Kitabı oku: «History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume 3 of 3. From the Accession of Nicholas II until the Present Day», sayfa 8

3. The "Black Hundred" and the "Patriotic" Pogroms

In this wise did the Jewish people, though chafing under thraldom and well-nigh crushed by it, strive for the light of liberty. But the forces of reaction were preparing to wreak terrible vengeance upon the prisoner for his endeavor to throw off his bonds. As the revolutionary tide, which had engulfed the best elements of the Russian people, was rolling on, it clashed with the filthy wave of the Black Hundred, which the underlings of Tzardom had called to the surface from the lowest depths of the Russian underworld. Acheronta movebo⁴⁶– this threat was now carried out systematically by the Government of Nicholas II. in its struggle with the emancipatory movement. By letting loose the Russian "nether-world" against the liberal intelligentzia and the Zhyds, the reactionaries hoped to achieve three objects at once: to intimidate the liberals and revolutionaries; to demonstrate the unwillingness of the "people" to abolish autocracy in favor of constitutional government, and, finally, to discredit the entire revolutionary movement as "the work of Jewish hands." The latter end could, in the opinion of the reactionaries, be obtained best by convincing the Russian masses that "the enemies of Christ are the only enemies of the Tzar." An open anti-Jewish agitation was set in motion. Proclamations of the Black Hundred with the appeals, "Slay the students and the Zhyds!" "Remember Kishinev and Homel!" were scattered broadcast. The proclamation of the "Nationalist Society" of Kiev, Odessa, Kishinev, and other cities contained the following sentences:

The shouts "Down with autocracy!" are the shouts of those blood-suckers who call themselves Zhyds, Armenians, and Poles… Be on your guard against the Zhyds! All the misfortunes in our lives are due to the Zhyds. Soon, very soon, the great time will come when there will be no Zhyds in Russia. Down with the traitors! Down with the constitution!

With the approaching Passover season, pogroms were openly organized. The papers were flooded with telegrams from many cities stating that riots were imminent. In some places the governors adopted measures to check the excesses of the savage crowd, but in many localities the pogroms were deliberately permitted or even directly engineered by the police. In the manufacturing city of Bialystok, the center of the Jewish labor movement, the Cossacks assaulted Jewish passers-by on the streets, invaded the synagogues and Jewish homes, cruelly maltreating their inmates and frequently searching them and taking away their money (April 9-10). During the Passover holidays, peasants made an attack upon the Jews in the town of Dusyaty, in the government of Kovno, looting their property and beating those that dared to oppose them. In the city of Melitopol, in the government of Tavrida, an intoxicated mob demolished and set fire to Jewish stores, and thereupon started to attack the houses of Christians, but the self-defence consisting of Jewish and Christian young men checked the pogrom (April 18-19). In Simferopol, in the same government, the Black Hundred spread a rumor that a Jewish boy, the son of a pharmacist, had desecrated a Christian ikon. A pogrom was set in motion which met with the resistance of the armed Jewish youth and was afterwards checked by the troops (April 22).

The most terrible outbreak took place in Zhitomir. In this quiet center of Volhynia the progressive elements of both the Jewish and the Russian population revelled in the joy of their political honeymoon. As had been the case in other large cities, here, too, the "bloody Sunday" of January called forth political strikes on the part of the workingmen, demonstrations on the part of the college youth, and the circulation of revolutionary appeals. The fact that the movement was headed by the Jewish youth was enough to inspire the Black Hundred to embark upon their criminal task. All kinds of rumors were set afloat, such as that the Jews had been firing at the Tzar's portrait on the field behind the city, that they were preparing to slaughter the Christians, and other absurd stories. At the approach of Passover, the pogrom organizers summoned to their aid a group of "Katzaps," Great-Russian laborers, from Moscow. The Jews, anticipating the danger, began to arm themselves in self-defence, and made their preparations openly. A clash between the "Black" and the "Red" was inevitable. It came in the form of a sanguinary battle which was fought on April 23-26, matching by its cruelty the pogrom at Homel, though exceeding it vastly by its dimensions.

In the course of three days, the city was in the hands of the black hordes who plundered, murdered and mutilated the Jews. They were fortified not only by quantities of alcohol, but also by the conviction that they were fighting for the Tzar against the "Sicilists,"⁴⁷ who clamored for "freedom" and a "republic." The Jewish self-defence performed prodigies of valor wherever they were not interfered with by the police and military, and died gallantly where the authorities actively assisted the savage work of the infuriated rioters. During the three pogrom days fifteen Jews were killed and nearly one hundred wounded, many of them severely. The casualties were mostly among young workingmen and handicraftsmen. But there were also some students among the victims, one of them a Christian, named Blinov, who stood up nobly for the assaulted Jews. The inhuman fiends fell upon Blinov, shouting: "Though you are a Russian, you are a Sicilist and worse than the Zhyds, now that you've come to defend them." The young hero was beaten to death, and the murderers were actively assisted by soldiers and policemen.

On one of those days, on April 25, a heart-rending tragedy took place in the town of Troyanov, in the government of Volhynia, not far from Zhitomir. Having learned of the massacre that was going on in Zhitomir, fourteen brave Jewish young men from the neighboring town of Chudnov armed themselves with cheap pistols, and proceeded to bring aid to their endangered fellow-Jews. On the way, while passing through Troyanov, they were met by a crowd of peasants and workingmen who had been aroused by a rumor that Jewish "slaughterers" were marching in order to exterminate the Russians. The infuriated mob fell upon the youths, and, in the presence of the local Jews, savagely killed ten of them, while the others were cruelly beaten. The following account of this ghastly occurrence was given by one of the survivors:

There were fourteen of us. We were on the way from Chudnov to Zhitomir. In Troyanov we were surrounded by Katzaps. They began to search us, taking away everything we had, and then started to beat us with hatchets and clubs. I saw my comrades fall down dead one after the other. Before the constabulary appeared, only four had remained alive, I and three other men. The constabulary ordered us to be carried to the hospital at Zhitomir, but on the way we were wrested by the Katzaps from the rural police and were tortured again… I was roped and dragged to the priest. He begged that I should be left alone. The Katzaps made fun of him, dragged me out again, and started to beat me. The policemen began to tell them that "they would answer for me," since the constabulary had ordered them to get me to Zhitomir. "Well," said the Katzaps, "if that be the case, we will let him go, but before we do this, that hound of a Jew must have a look at his fellow-Zhyds." I was then dragged in an unconscious state to my comrades. I found myself in a pool of water. I had been drenched so as to make me regain consciousness. Then I beheld the dead bodies of my ten comrades… No matter how long I may live, I shall never forget that sight… One of them lay with his head chopped off; another with a ripped stomach … cut off hands… I fell into a swoon, and found myself here in this bed.

In the cemetery of Troyanov one may still behold the ten graves of the youthful martyrs who unselfishly went to the rescue of their brethren against beasts in human form, and were on the way torn to pieces by these beasts – ten graves which ought to become sacred to the entire Jewish people.

The Government reacted upon the Zhitomir massacre by an official communication in which the facts were deliberately garbled in order to prove that the Jews had called forth the pogrom by their conduct. It was alleged in this communication that, during their shooting exercises in the woods, the Jews had discharged their pistols at the portrait of the Tzar, had hurled insulting remarks at the police escort which was conveying a band of political prisoners, had issued a proclamation in the name of "the criminal party of the Social-Revolutionaries" in which the authorities of Zhitomir were accused of preparing the pogrom, and similar charges. The concrete object of the official communication is betrayed in its concluding part in which the governors are enjoined "to explain to the sober-minded section of the Jewish population that, in the interest of the safety of the Jewish masses, it is in duty bound to inspire their coreligionists who have been drawn into the political struggle with the consciousness of the absolute necessity of refraining from arousing by their behavior the hatred of the Christian population against them." Translated into plain terms, the Government order meant: "If you do not wish to have pogroms and massacres, then keep your hands off the liberty movement; but if you will persist in playing a part in it, then the Christian population will make short work of you, dealing with you as with enemies of the Fatherland."

Caught in the general revolutionary conflagration which flared up with particular violence in the summer of 1905, after the destruction of the Russian fleet by the Japanese near Tsushima, the Jews reacted upon the pogroms by intensifying their revolutionary activity and swelling the number of self-defence organizations. Russian Jewry played an active part in the two wings of the emancipation army, the Constitutional-Democratic as well as the Social-Democratic party, and was represented even in the extreme wing occupied by the Social-Revolutionaries. The majority of these Jewish revolutionaries were actuated by general Russian aspirations, and were often entirely oblivious of the national interests of Judaism. This, however, did not prevent the henchmen of the Tzar from visiting the "sin" of the revolution upon the Jewish masses. A vicious circle was the result of this policy: As victims of the old despotism, the Jews naturally threw in their lot with the revolution which promised to do away with it; thereupon uncivilized Russia vented its fury upon them by instituting pogroms which, in turn, pushed them more and more into the ranks of the revolution.

During the summer months of 1905, a new succession of pogroms took place, this time of the military variety. Wrought up over the defeats of the Russian army in Manchuria, and roused by the vile proclamations of the Black Hundred which pictured the Jews as the inner enemy, soldiers and Cossacks began to wreak their vengeance upon this inner enemy, assaulting and killing or wounding Jews on the streets of Minsk (May 26), Brest-Litovsk (May 29-31), Syedletz and Lodz (June 9). In the first three cities, the soldiers plundered and murdered only the Jews. In Lodz, they fired at a mixed Polish-Jewish demonstration of workingmen. A regular butchery was engineered by the soldiery in Bialystok (June 30). During the entire day, the city resounded with the rifle shots of maddened soldiers who were firing into peaceful Jewish crowds. Fifty dead and a still larger number of wounded were the result of these military exploits.

During the same time a regularly organized pogrom occurred in the southern outskirts of Russia, in the city of Kerch, in the Crimea. On July 27, a peaceful political demonstration of the kind then generally in vogue took place in that city; among the participants were also the Jewish youth. By way of protest, the city-governor and gendarmerie chief organized a "patriotic" counter-demonstration, which was held a few days later, on July 31. Carrying a banner with the portrait of the Tzar and singing the Russian national hymn, the "patriotic" hordes, with the notorious local thieves and hooligans as the predominating element, sacked Jewish houses and stores, and, in the name of patriotism, looted Jewish property – even the so-called respectable public participating in the latter act. When the armed Jewish self-defence began to oppose the rioters, they were scattered by a volley from the soldiers, ten of them being killed on the spot. The subsequent inquiry established the fact that the pogrom had been fully prepared by the police and gendarmerie authorities, which had been in telegraphic communication in regard to it with the Police Department in St. Petersburg. It was a rehearsal of the monstrous October pogroms which were to take place a few months later.

4. The Jewish Franchise

In the midst of the noise caused by the revolution on the one hand and by the pogroms on the other, the question of popular representation, promised in the ukase of February 18, 1905, was discussed in the highest Government spheres of Russia. A committee, which met under the chairmanship of M. Bulyghin, was drafting a scheme of a consultative popular assembly; as far as the Jews were concerned, it was proposed to exclude them from the franchise, on the ground that the latter would not be compatible with their civil disfranchisement. This proposition, which was in entire accord with the general reactionary trend of Russian politics, called forth a storm of indignation in all circles of Russian Jewry. During the month of June protest resolutions against the contemplated measure were adopted by the Jewish communities of St. Petersburg, Riga, Kishinev, Bobruisk, Zhitomir, Nicholayev, Minsk, Vitebsk, Vilna, and other cities. Many resolutions were couched in violent terms betraying the outraged sentiments of Russian Jewry. As an illustration, the following extract from the Vilna resolution may be quoted:

In the proposed scheme of popular representation, we Jews, a cultured nation of six millions, are placed below the semi-savage aliens of Eastern Russia. The policy of pacification applied to other suppressed nationalities has given way to a policy of terrorization when the Jews are concerned. The mad system, consisting in the endeavor to irritate and infuriate the Jews by mediæval persecutions and thereupon wreak vengeance on them for the manifestation of that irritation, has now reached its climax… We appeal to the Russian people, which is now called upon to renovate the antiquated political structure of the country… We are of the hope that the malign vindictiveness toward the Jews on the part of the retiring bureaucracy, which is eager to carry over the ferments of corruption into the healthy atmosphere of the future popular representation, will not be realized.

Professor Trubetzkoy, who waited upon the Tzar on June 6, at the head of a combined deputation of Zemstvos and municipalities, pointed out in his famous speech that no one should be excluded from popular representation: "It is important that there should not be any disfranchised and disinherited." The Government was shaken in its resolution, and the Council of Ministers eliminated from the Bulyghin project the clause barring the Jews from voting, justifying this step by the undesirability "to irritate the Jews still further."

The Jewish question was also touched upon in the conferences at Peterhof, which were held during the month of July under the chairmanship of the Tzar, to formulate plans for an Imperial Duma. Naryshkin, a reactionary dignitary, demanded that "the dangerous Jewish nation" be barred from the Duma. But a number of other dignitaries – the Minister of Finance, Kokovtzev, the Assistant-Minister of the Interior, Trepov, and Obolenski and Chikhachev, members of the Council of State – advocated their admission, and the discussions were terminated by the brief remark of the Tzar: "The project [with the insertion of the Council of Ministers in favor of the Jews] shall be left unaltered."

By this action, the Government made itself guilty of a flagrant inconsistency. It conferred upon the Jews the highest political privilege – the right of voting for popular representatives – but left them at the same time in a state of complete civil disfranchisement, even with regard to such elementary liberties as the right of domicile, the right of transit, and so on. Only one month previously, on June 8, the Tzar had approved the "Opinion" of the Committee of Ministers – in pursuance of the ukase of December 12, 1904, the Committee had been busy discussing the Jewish problem – to the effect that the consideration of the question of ameliorating the condition of the Jews should be deferred until the convocation of the new Parliament. Evidently, the anti-Jewish conscience of the Tzar made it impossible for him to grant even the slightest relief to the Jews who from pariahs had been turned into revolutionaries.

CHAPTER XXXVI
THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND THE OCTOBER MASSACRES

1. The Fiendish Designs of the "Black Hundred"

Soon afterwards, on August 6, 1905, the so-called "Bulyghin Constitution" was made public, providing for a truncated Imperial Duma with a system of representation based on class qualifications and limited to advisory functions but without any restrictions as far as the franchise of the Jews was concerned. "Now," wrote the Voskhod, "the Jew has the right to be a popular representative, but he has no right to reside in the place in which the Imperial Duma assembles – in the capital." Russian Jewry, with the exception of its Left wing, was on the point of starting an election campaign to send its representatives to this mutilated Duma, in the hope of attaining through it to a more perfect form of representation, when the stormy course of events brought to the fore new threatening questions. This counterfeit of a national parliament failed to satisfy the Russian democracy, and the struggle with the Government broke out anew with unprecedented energy. Stormy political meetings were held at the universities and at the other institutions of higher learning, which, by an ukase of August 27, had been granted academic self-government. The autonomous professorial councils began to admit Jewish students to the schools, without any restrictive percentage, and the wave of an agitated Jewish youth was drawn into the whirling sea of the Russian student body. A new succession of strikes followed, arranged by the students, workingmen and railroad workers. A general Russian strike was being carefully prepared as a last resort in the struggle for a democratic constitution. The army of the emancipation movement was instituting a bloodless revolution, the temporary stoppage of all railroad movements and of all other activities in the country, in the hope of forcing Tzardom to an act of self-abnegation and the proclamation of civil liberties.

The month of September and the beginning of October were spent in these feverish preparations, but at the same time, the black army of absolutism was making its own arrangements for a sanguinary counter-revolution, for regular St. Bartholomew nights, directed against the participants in the emancipation movement, and particularly against the Jews. The plans of the emancipation army were universally known, but the terrible designs of the dark forces of reaction were effectively concealed. Only when the bloody undertaking was accomplished, was it possible to uncover the threads of the criminal pogrom organization, which led from the palaces of the Tzar and the highest dignitaries of state, by way of the Police Department, to the slums of murderers and hooligans. In the disclosures made by Lvov, in November, 1905, in his memorandum to Witte, the president of the Council of Ministers, the officials in the immediate environment of Nicholas II. who had organized the October pogroms were pointed out by name. They were the "patriotic" General Bogdanovich in St. Petersburg, who acted with the blessing of Archbishop⁴⁸ Vladimir and with the assistance of the Imperial camarilla and of many governors and governors-general in the provinces. During the month of September "fighting contingents" of the Black Hundred, whose number, as Bogdanovich boasted in the highest government spheres, amounted to one hundred thousand, were organized all over Russia. In every city the parts to be enacted by the administrators, the police and the pogrom hirelings from among the local riff-raff were carefully prepared and assigned. The pogrom proclamations were printed openly; the "manufacturing" center of this propaganda literature, as was afterwards disclosed in the Imperial Duma by deputy Urussov (formerly Assistant-Minister of the Interior), was located in the printing office of the Police Department. There can be no question that the Tzar was acquainted, if not with all the details of these preparations, at least with the general plan of arranging a counter-revolution by means of carefully engineered massacres of which the Jews were to become the chief victims. Millions of rubles for the organization of the pogroms were appropriated from a secret ten-million ruble fund, the disposition of which lay entirely in the hands of the Tzar.

Such were the conditions which ushered in the month of October, 1905. The first days of the month saw the beginning of the railroad strike; by the middle of the month it had already seized the entire country, accompanied in the industrial centers by a general strike in all lines of productive endeavor. In many cities, collisions took place between the revolutionaries and the military. At first, the Government made an attempt to resort to threats, and all over Russia rang the blood-thirsty cry of the Chief of Police Trepov: "No cartridges shall be spared!" But at the last moment, autocracy recoiled before the revolutionary tempest and gave way. On October 17, an imperial manifesto was issued, solemnly promising to bestow all civil liberties upon the Russian people – inviolability of person, freedom of conscience, liberty of speech, assemblage and organization, and a legislative Duma in which the representatives of all classes of the population were to have a voice. The manifesto made no mention, however, of the equality of all citizens before the law or of the bestowal of equal rights on the various nationalities, and even in the accompanying memorandum of Premier Witte, the author of the enactment of October 17, the subject was disposed of in a few nebulous phrases.

Nevertheless, even in this hazy form, the manifesto made a tremendous impression. Everybody believed that autocratic Tzardom had been vanquished by the army of liberty and that Russia had been finally converted from a state founded on police force into a body politic based on law. But, on the day following, all these hopes were cruelly shattered. On October 18, in hundreds of cities the carefully concealed army of counter-revolutionaries, evidently obeying a prearranged signal, crawled out from beneath the ground, to indulge in an orgy of blood, lasting a full week (October 18-25), which in its horrors finds no parallel in the entire history of humanity.